Spencer Tunick: In the Nude.
Although we may be art incubator with the vision of upholding the next generation of artist, we still acknowledge the great men and women that have made a dent in the art world, not only by celebrating their memories but as well by following their ever-growing career, expecting what will be next for them.
We wish to highlight a trailblazer photographer Spencer Tunick, who has impacted photography as medium due his photos in the nude, which have taken over entire cities around the world and created amazing pieces of collective effort, many more things can be said about this artist and his works, which we have the fortune to have a pair in our collection, but first we want to look into his beginnings.
Before the naked eye of the public.
Born in January 1st 1967, Tunick had an early interest in photography from his father Earl Tunick, who created a portable photo-viewer, similar to other stereoscopes toys and key chains like the View-Master, filled with Earl’s photos of the Appalachian mountain range known as the Catskills.
Tunick was also inspired by photography of North American indigenous people taken by ethnologist Edward Sherrif Curtis, who like Tunick has also been label as a quite controversial photographer due his portrayal of indigenous people as a fading people in America.
With those inspiration in photography, Spencer Tunick would move to Massachusetts to study in Emerson College, earning his Bacherlors in Art in 1988; from there would start exploring his signature subject of photography as the 1990s approached.
Individuality in mass.
Spencer Tunick’s style started to develop before his entrance to Emerson College, during a trip to London in 1986, where he would take his first pictures of a naked individual in the public life of the English capital.
He would continue with this type of series when he moved to New York, taking an interested in naked figures taking part of the day to day life of buzzing city like New York, during this early period of nude photo at the start of the 1990s, his model used to be a singular individual or smaller group shots.
With his series Tunick Cities in 1994, Spencer Tunick arrived to what would become his individual and recognizable style of art, where he took a big group shot of the 28 people in front of the United Nation Headquarters.
For Tunick himself and the people who had studied his career, this moment symbolizes a big shift in the type of art and artist that he would become, as the art statement was not only the end result of the image, but the whole performativity of his action, as his art move from the shocking contrast of the individual nude person over a public space, and turned into a gallery of naked bodies, losing their individuality and even the shock of nudity when in contrast to a big city.
After the success of these photos, Tunick started to make more of the large scale group shots in the nudes, and exploring different landmarks of New York to make his performance and photos.
Eventually one city wasn’t enough for this massive events leading his artwork, so in 1997 he started his Naked States projects, leaving New York behind to create this space and artworks capturing them in other big cities of the United States.
Since 2000s his projects have gone to an international route, going to important cities and landmarks around the world, Tunick and his group masses started to fill this public spaces in the nude and becoming part of these art-life experience.
The styles and themes of this photography had changed with the time without abandoning his recognizable event and group masse shots, but Tunick has experiment with the way this event and its participants work, as well to the way it’s portrayed in the picture.
Since the beginning of his career sexuality and nudity had been separated, as it was just a naked body of the city view, but Tunick exploration had taken him to change the nude subject from mundane to become a bigger part of the picture.
In his modern series, the participants of the even changed from day to day in the nude, to the visual landmarks themselves, where bodies touch and bend to created abstract images on the recognizable cities or in nature; other pieces of his work have experimented with color, painting the naked bodies or even making them hold props.
Tunick in Colombia.
As a Colombian owned company with a sizeable part of our staff hailing from the South American country, the presence of Colombia in the art sphere is important as place for both art and cultural management.
Besides lifting rising talent o paying our respect to legends of the modern and contemporary Colombian art, we value the impact of foreign artist coming to the country and the way their artwork is impacted by their stayed.
In Tunick’s case, the Colombian capital of Bogotá became one of Tunick’s cities, been among the few Latin-American capitals where the artist has operated in; coming in year 2016, Tunick’s call for volunteers ended up with around 6000 volunteers taking part of his next photograph at the historic city center of capital.
The even took place around June 5th, where the volunteers arrived early in the morning, ignoring the cold Andean morning while the last glimpses of the night sky disappear, posing body to body into a triangle shape, Spencer would took the first of many nude photos in Bogotá, as beside this main piece, he would also take some other less grandiose picture inside other noticeable landmarks of the capital like the Colon Theater.
Even after departing from Bogotá with his new art pieces, the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá (MAMBO) would open its own exhibition about Tunick’s life and work later that year, in which the photos taken in the city would be showcase during the end of the year exhibition.
Spencer Tunick is truly a trailer blazer in both photography and performance, as well as showing how much art requires more than one person to be create with such a scale of greatness as his nude in masse pictures. As well as showcasing how international collective efforts like his can go due the recognition of his great talent.
